Since Toby Young’s appointment to the government’s new higher education watchdog – the Office for Students – critics have trawled through his past for evidence of unsuitability for the role.

Included in a catalogue of offensive tweets and choice quotes is an article written by Young in 2015, titled The Fall of the Meritocracy. In the article Young takes issue with past attempts to secure social mobility through heavy state intervention. He adopts the classic liberal argument that state intervention should be strictly limited or it becomes coercive.

The only way of encouraging social mobility in a liberal society – a society that values freedom – is to give individuals the power to drive their own upward mobility. Young’s solution: give parents with low IQs the tools to increase the intelligence of their offspring.

In his argument, Young claims that a degree of social mobility is necessary to ensure that an unequal society remains palatable to those who suffer it most. If social divisions were relatively fixed, those at the bottom of the pile would be more likely to revolt.

Toby Young with pupils at the West London Free School. Toby Young/Facebook

Meritocracy can nonetheless endanger itself, Young argues, and needs to be protected. Here he makes the highly controversial claim that meritocratic selection is reorganising class boundaries according to IQ. From Young’s perspective, this is a problem for social stability.

For many on the left – the so called “twitchfork mob” in Young’s terms – he will have already said enough to place himself on the wrong side of history. But he goes further, arguing for a revival of eugenics – the widely discredited science of selective breeding.

He imagines a type of “progressive eugenics” that would “discriminate in favour of the disadvantaged”. It would do so by offering a form of (as yet unavailable) embryo intelligence screening, “free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs”. This would help reverse the otherwise “inevitable” consolidation of each social class around a similar genetic profile.

Confronting eugenics

There is much one might take issue with in Young’s argument. For a start on the topic of meritocracy, there is sociologist Jo Littler’s recent claim that meritocracy scarcely exists. She describes it as:

The great delusion that ingrains inequality.

In other words, meritocracy only functions to offer ideological cover for plutocracy – or government by the wealthy. That is to say, it functions as a dominant social ideal, providing cover for exactly the kind of government that has promoted Young to a position of power. More simply put, Young’s argument about a cognitive elite seems odd to those who feel that there are already too many fools in power.

Young’s accompanying argument, that meritocracy can only be saved by eugenics, will strike many as almost too offensive to warrant reply. But this risks denying the long association between 20th-century efforts to establish meritocracy, and the late 19th and early 20th-century science of eugenics.